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Issues in Mental Health

Szasz (2011) the myth of mental illness: mental illness as a metaphor

  • 2 things to know
  • Component 03

Overview

Recall questions on the nature and purpose of Szasz's 2011 article The myth of mental illness: 50 years later, how genuine diseases and mental disorders are identified, mental illness as a metaphor, problems in living, and the practices he wants abolished.

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Key term

What does Szasz say happens once a physical cause for a condition is discovered?

Who and when

Which two psychiatric practices does he argue should be abolished?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What kind of work is this, and why does that matter?

    Model answer

    It is a theoretical review article rather than an empirical study, arguing a case through conceptual, historical and legal analysis, so it collects no data and produces no statistics.

  2. 2

    What was Szasz's purpose in writing it?

    Model answer

    To restate and defend, fifty years after his original claim, the argument that mental illness is a metaphor rather than a literal disease, and to ask why psychiatry had not changed.

  3. 3

    On what basis does Szasz say a genuine disease must be identified?

    Model answer

    On demonstrable physical abnormality in the body's cells, tissues or organs, established by objective bodily signs rather than by what a person says or does.

  4. 4

    How are mental disorders identified instead?

    Model answer

    They are identified from a person's behaviour and speech judged against social expectations, with no bodily lesion required at any point.

  5. 5

    What does Szasz say happens once a physical cause for a condition is discovered?

    Model answer

    The condition is reclassified as a neurological disease and passes out of psychiatry altogether, as happened with the psychiatric symptoms produced by syphilis.

  6. 6

    What term does he prefer for the difficulties psychiatry treats?

    Model answer

    He calls them problems in living rather than diseases.

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